We would want the solution to the safety problem before somebody figures out the solution to the AI problem.

Are you living in a computer simulation?

Knowledge about limitations of your data collection process affects what inferences you can draw from the data.

Our approach to existential risks cannot be one of trial-and-error. There is no opportunity to learn from errors. The reactive approach - see what happens, limit damages, and learn from experience - is unworkable. Rather, we must take a proactive approach. This requires foresight to anticipate new types of threats and a willingness to take decisive preventive action and to bear the costs (moral and economic) of such actions.

Human nature is a work in progress.

Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.